t/Space's Spiral 1 CXV as entry for America's Space Prize?

For those unfamiliar with t/Space, it's a commercial space company which teams together Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, Elon Musk's SpaceX, Red Whittaker (the robotics expert who headed the best-performing team from Carnegie Mellon in the DARPA Grand Challenge), and several other groups, They were one of eleven companies to awarded a $3 million NASA contract to pursue an early concept study to develop an architecture for the Vision for Space Exploration and the Crew Exploration Vehicle.

In their recently-released mid-term architecture briefing for NASA (available at http://transformspace.com/Background.htm), t/Space shows some images and details of their proposed Spiral 1 CXV (S1CXV) for ferrying a crew of six to LEO. The S1CXV would be launched on top of a rocket supplied by a company like SpaceX, Kistler, or AirLaunch.

If t/Space doesn't get the final NASA contract for the VSE, would the S1CXV be eligible for America's Space Prize? The craft's proposed capabilities with regards to docking and crew size seem like a perfect match for the prize. I'm concerned that it might not be eligible though, since NASA is funding some of the initial designs.

Wouldn't the 3m contract from NASA constitute government support? I'd think that that would exclude them from ASP.

That's what I'm uncertain about. Here's what the rules say:



What if no actual designs are made using the $3m contract, but only determinations of feasibility and desired capabilities? What if t/Space pays one of its member companies to the designs? What if the money for the design of the S1CXV comes from internal funds, and the $3m goes towards just designing the architecture, overall plan, and the design of the other vehicles? It gets a little ambiguous then, I think.

Sorry, but a slight but perhaps important correction has to be made - SpaceX is not part of the consortium according to my last look at their website. Elon Musk is involved as member of a board instead. So he and his company don't be involved in the development of the CEV/VSE.

According to my look into the .pdf-document the link to has been posted at this board yesterday the whole concept consists of more than one launch and one of the launches would be an air launch Scaled has agreed the vehicle, equipment etc. to develop for.

So t/Space is developing an infrastructural concept and several spacecrafts - Earth-to-Orbit spacecrafts, Orbit-to-Moon spacecrafts and tankers. t/Space has got $,3000,000 for this development.

Scaled still has the chance to develop the vehicle they are responsible for without government funding - t/Space has got the 3,000,000, not Scaled.

There may be another reason why nothing of this will be considered to be an ASP vehicle - the capacities required can be considered to be higher than required by that prize perhaps.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)